Joshua Elon Brown owed Morehouse College about $18,000.
That was until he checked his student portal one day this past October. He logged in like normal, but the balance was cleared.
It was a miracle.
“I just broke out into tears,” Brown said. “I literally was just like, ‘Thank you God, this is all I ever wanted.’”
The payment in his account was credited to the “Rolling Jubilee”—the debt abolition fund for an organization called The Debt Collective.
The Collective had bought Brown’s past-due account balance and wiped it clean. They did the same for nearly 3,000 Morehouse students and alumni this fall.
This was not the school’s first gift of this kind.
In 2019, billionaire Robert Smith pledged about $34 million to eliminate the loan debt for Morehouse’s graduates that year.
“This is my class, 2019,” he started to the young men dawned in cap and gown. “And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans.”
As the weight of Smith’s gift and the implications of living debt-free settled over the crowd, enthusiastic applause grew to an exalted ovation.
“MVP! MVP!” the graduates cheered from their seats.
Smith’s private act of philanthropy had given Morehouse a platform.
For Andrew Douglas, a professor of political science at Morehouse, that platform offered an opportunity.
“That really is the catalyst for the development of my class,” Douglas said. “We really needed to develop some curriculum connected to this so that we could build and sustain a movement of educated students who could really develop some critical analysis of debt crises of various sorts.”
“Part of that class entailed learning a lot about the Debt Collective,” he continued. “That led to a relationship with some of the organizers at the Debt Collective, and one thing led to another, and they floated the idea of bringing their debt relief…
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